Yeah, I know what you mean. This cloud thing scares me too. I hate the idea of relying on distant servers for accessing my music, my software, and in short my data. Of having a company own a large part of my life.

This is why I don't use iTunes, and when asked about DAP/Phones/whatever purchases, always suggest to buy UMS devices allowing software and data sideloading and backup. Unlike you. Strange, eh ?

No, if you want to accuse Thom of having some double standards, let's ask him why for some services being US-only is a fundamental defect which directly leads to failure in the long term, while for this Music Beta thing it's just "sad"...

No, if you want to accuse Thom of having some double standards, let's ask him why for some services being US-only is a fundamental defect which directly leads to failure in the long term, while for this Music Beta thing it's just "sad"...

Yeah, I know what you mean. This cloud thing scares me too. I hate the idea of relying on distant servers for accessing my music, my software, and in short my data. Of having a company own a large part of my life.

I kinda feel the backlash against the cloud by some in the tech world is overstating things themselves. Should people put everything on someone elses servers and not store anything locally? Hell no, you should have local copies of everything. But as people start using more and more devices, storing a copy of everything on each machine just isn't feasible. Naturally the solution is a good ol' client/server system. Except people don't want to administer their own severs, even among those who have the ability not everyone wants to do it themselves.

Is it any surprise then that people go to amazon, google or soon apple to do it for them. And no matter how many outages or misteps these services have people will keep coming back to them, because for most people it will still be better than doing it themselves.

Sure But what mrhasbeen was mentioning, I think, was an hypothetic future where google services would be like Steam and Apple's App Store are now : a cloud-only world, where local copies are not feasible.

As an aside, I'm can also perfectly tolerate such solutions when it's about things which don't matter much to me. As an example, most of the single-player games I play are disposable pieces of fun which I'm done with in a week or so, so Steam is good enough for that, even though I strongly dislike their "no local copy" philosophy as a whole.

I just recently released my own music player (http://www.stoffiplayer.com) where I have been thinking of doing the same thing Google is doing now.

I would love to hear about tips on how to beat them (or if I should integrate them).

What about:
* Not a company, but a non-profit organization, which donates all extra profit to charity
* Your data is encrypted and we cannot read it
* No ads... anywhere!
* Great tools for easy migration away from the service